SBURB Glitch FAQ

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##################  The skaia.net Dungeon  #####################

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"What the heck is skaia.net (FAQ)", a quick and interesting guest chapter by everlastingSnow about the Skaia.net laboratory and optional dungeon.

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################  Frequently asked Questions  ##################

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Question: What IS Skaia.net? Is it some sort of website?
I’m glad you asked. It isn’t actually a website, despite what the name suggests. It’s an Easter egg that appears in some sessions. It doesn’t appear too often. It is in about 30-40% of sessions. It isn’t that likely that you’ll find one on your first playthrough. After a few sessions however, you may hear about it from your consorts or your friends from theirs.
Question: Ok, enough of the lecture. What is this Easter egg?
It’s a giant laboratory.

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It probably won’t look exactly like this. It may have a bigger tower or a satellite dish on the top or no windows. It varies from session to session. The one above is just an example of Skaia.net labs.

Question: Why is it called Skaia.net if it isn’t a website?
Skaia.net is not the actual name of it. It’s just a nickname used by SBURB players to identify it. When your consorts (Or your co-players’ consorts) mention it, they will refer to it as “A giant building that appeared when the X of X entered their land” (X of X = your Class + Aspect). The nickname Skaia.net came from the name of the wireless internet connection that comes from the lab.

Question: So it is generated when a player enters the medium?

Not exactly. It comes from your homeworld.

Question: Wait WHAT?!

It’s kind of complicated (and a little strange). I’ll try my best to explain. In some sessions, one of the players may live near a laboratory before entering the Medium. This lab will emit a wireless internet connection which will be named Skaia.net. It will be an unsecured wireless network and will allow the player to connect whenever they need to.
When the player installs SBURB, the game will register the lab as part of the player’s home and bring it with the player when they enter. This is not a bug but rather a feature. It is kind of like a bonus dungeon that anyone can enter! It usually ends up being near a consort village and is often too far for the player to see from their house but close enough for the player to find it easily.

Question: So, what's in the lab?

Lots of interesting things! Some have more or less than others and won’t always contain the same things. I won’t claim to have seen everything but I have seen a LOT of things in there. Here’s a list:
• Lab equipment. Not fancy SBURB lab stuff. Things like test tubes, Bunsen burners, unlabeled containers with chemicals in them (don’t touch those!) and other science things.
• Children’s toys. (Ex. Doll house, tea set, teddy bear ect.) Why? Just, Why?
• Appearifier. I wouldn’t touch an appearifier unless you are a Time player, Space player (frog breeding), your session’s ectobiologist or you know what you’re doing. Trying to grab things that you or someone else interacted with in the past will cause a paradox and you WILL get slime everywhere!
• Transportalizer. These things are FUN! They work the same way a Space player’s portals do but it is an actual machine rather than just a player ability. Basically if you stand on one it will transport you to a different one in a different room. It makes it ten times easier to get around. I love these things.
• ????????. I’m not sure what to call this thing. It doesn’t have a specific name. It’s basically this huge computer that will show your old planet. It shows all of the meteor locations and how soon they will land/ if they’ve landed. The places where meteors have already crashed are red, if one is about to crash it will be yellow, green means it will soon but it isn’t an immediate threat and blue means that it isn’t even there yet but it will be soon. No colour means no meteor. Simple as that. It isn’t very helpful in-game but if you find it before entry you can find out how long you and your co-players have. That’s pretty helpful.
• AN EXTREMELY ANNOYING AI. Yet again, there is no specific name for this thing. In my fourth session I got an annoying AI named Bruce. He sucked. Anyway, This AI somehow manages to hack Pesterchum and taunt you via chat. You can’t block it, it will unblock itself. If you ignore it, it will not stop. The only way to make it stop is to leave the Lab. It is ten times more annoying than the Nightmare Heir!
• Mutated animals? I’ve only found one once. It was a little, black dog with four tails. I named it Tails and later prototyped it. He was a good boy.

Question: Enough about the dog! What else?

The only other thing I’ve ever seen in there was a dungeon. I’m pretty sure that’s the only thing that is guaranteed to be in there. That and a crapload of mutant imps!

Question: Wait… Mutant imps?

Yep. Instead of normal Imps, you get their uglier, radioactive cousin, the mutant imp! These little guys have a lot of weird features because, well, they’re mutants! They basically look like a blank imp template but with little extra things added to them. Sometimes they have extra appendages, Spikes, tentacles, extra eyes, etc. They will all glow green and they all have a bigger health vial than normal imps. They are supposed to look like a science experiment gone wrong, which is what they look like. They respawn quickly when killed because the room is an apoxial ebonpyre. They're hard to deal with but they're more rewarding and it's a good place to max out your echeladder. You will also find a special trap door with stairs that go down, however, it only appears after the building appears in the Medium. That's the way to the optional dungeon.

Question: Dungeon?

Yep. It’s an optional dungeon that can be entered via the trap door in one of the rooms in the lab. It will be marked with only a spirograph (enter) and anyone can go in. It leads to another floor with more monsters and puzzles and traps and lab equipment. You can find another trapdoor with stairs that go down and it goes on like that forever. The weird thing is that any Space player will tell you that something isn't right down there, like, there's some serious spatial wrongness taking place. And it's true. The dungeon just keeps going down forever. It's like in games when you have an extra dungeon that goes down 999+ floors and nobody ever saw the end of it. That's basically what the skaia.net dungeon is, it keeps going even though it's geographically impossible. Something about pocket dimensions at work. The point is, you just go down floors after floors and they become slightly bigger and harder every time. It also becomes harder to connect to your friend via the Medium's magical internet. Even your session's Seer will tell you that people feel farther away as they progress down the floors. Another quirky thing about the dungeon is that after a bunch of floors, when you're too far away to contact people outside of the dungeon, you start being contacted by a NPC. It's the only NPC that operated through the chat client and it's supposed to be like a mad AI. It has a mad kink for taunting you and teasing you like a crybaby. Something about how you'll never reach all of the wonderful GAME SECRETS stored at the bottom of the dungeon.
A lot of veteran players have tried to challenge the limit of the infinite skaia.net dungeon. They were never seen again. Nobody knows where that stupid dungeon even *goes*. According to some it ollies outy right out of the session itself. Some accounts say that after 999 floors, the thing has no sign of ending but the new floors start being glitchy and unstable. Like a randomly generated dungeon going awry.
Usually I just rage-quit around the 20th floor and steal all of the Lab coats and equipment scattered around.
Note: As previously mentioned, your Space player is going to hate it down there. Please do NOT drag them down there. Also, Void players LOVE this thing! Keep this in mind when picking dungeon buddies!

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###################        Glitches         ####################
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Like everything else in SBURB, this thing has a crap load of glitches:
• Sometimes, if it is heavily damaged before entry, the lab won’t enter with you. It will just sit there on your homeland, like a bump on a log, being absolutely useless as it is further destroyed by meteors. This is stupid.
• Occasionally, a mutant OhGodWhat will spawn outside the lab. I have one thing to say to you if you are that unlucky. Run and hope it doesn’t see you!
• If the player who owns the land dies, when their land begins going into grief and everything disappears, Skaia.net Labs will remain for some reason! It won’t have any mutant imps and is therefore easier to complete. It won’t give you the echeladder rung though and it’s kind of boring without imps so there’s no real point.
• Sometimes mutant imps will spawn without any mutations but will still glow green and will still be called Mutant imps.
• Sometimes the door to the lab is locked. You’ll have to break a window. If it doesn’t have a window, you can’t enter. (Might not be a glitch but I’m pretty sure you're supposed to be able to get in!)
• Sometimes the AI will try to kill you. It is not supposed to do that. Abscond immediately.
Maturity Quest FAQ [43B]
spacetimeCounselor
Thanks to GGTG/grindinglyGodliest/whatever you're going by these days for giving me the opportunity to broaden people's knowledge and stuff! Anybody who's reading this without having read his Sburb Glitch FAQ, get on over there and check it out if you want to live! Seriously, this game will probably kill you otherwise.
A note to my past self: I know this hits your timestamp early- I'd advise you not to read this until you've gone and written it later on. You don't want to give up your -literal- intellectual property to Sburb's predestination mechanism! You'll have to go and figure this shit out yourself.

Lastly, thanks to percipientMatriarch, vacuumtubeVisage, enhancementEnthusiast, and the rest of my session mates for providing data and assisting with research. Additional thanks to bayesianMechanist, stanzicApparati, tenaciousTheseus, and the admins of Sburb.org for supplementary data and helping me to get the word out. You guys rule!

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@***Introduction to Maturity***@
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Hey, kid. You're playing Sburb, am I right? You've been dumped into a magical world full of dangerous creatures and exciting adventures, and you've been tasked with a boatload of super complicated quests and weird puzzle shit to get done. Shit is mad unfamiliar, and you're struggling to make sense of this new environment while simultaneously accomplishing a bunch of heroic objectives. It's pretty overwhelming, y'know? Figuring out how to get by in the face of all these new challenges is gonna be pretty taxing, emotionally speaking.
Now, there's a lot of people out there- some of you might just be perfectly well-adjusted individuals. Perhaps you've got your shit together, and you're not going to flip your lid just because Earth (or other home planet, turns out aliens are a thing) and everyone in it has been destroyed and you've been given the responsibility of making a new universe to replace it. That's what you're doing here, in case you haven't figured it out by now. But really, I'm not messing around. There's people who're gonna be pretty chill, more or less able to cope with all of it.
Sburb doesn't think so. It's going to push your limits, and if it can't find your limits then god dammit it's going to make some. Like, your Denizen? Your jimmies, as it happens, are not eternal, and your triumvirate is going to have the SHIT rustled out of it. Sburb, through its impenetrable mechanism of temporal inevitability and the rewriting of cause and effect, will ensure that your emotional state gets wrecked in one way or another. It's going to happen, this is a science fact.
So, there's something of an air of futility to the game's "Maturity Quests". If you're going to have a total mental breakdown anydangway, why bother with all this character-building nonsense? Why are they even there in the first place?
Well, firstly- I don't like to tell people to abandon a train of thought, but listen. Maturity quests help. If you don't do them, the game will come up with something to punish you, and you're failing to master tactfulness or whatever is going to bite you in the ass. It's not a matter of probabilities- it WILL happen. And honestly, a lot of new players need to get a little sense smacked into them and game maturity is occasionally an actual help. Also, hey, you have to do them or else you can't learn the song to wake your Denizen, WHOOOOOOPS
DISCLAIMER: This is a Maturity Quest FAQ, not a Maturity FAQ. I'm not going to give you tips on your personal development, because I'm not in the business of writing shitty self-help books. Personally, I don't trust the game's idea of "maturity"- it's mostly focused on acceptance, on molding you into the kind of player that follows the rules and doesn't cause trouble. The fact that it doesn't stick, that it can evaporate as soon as the game is over... it's all part of a really rather scary perspective on behavior. Like, Psy-buffs? What the fuck are those? The very idea that you can describe something as a "psychological buff" is already uncomfortably Orwellian, to say nothing of Corruption or "the Heart thing".
Nevertheless, these are things you have to go through if you want to finish the game. Why these are necessary, how they help, what you'll need to do to complete them- that's the subject of this FAQ. There are rules, there are exploits, and you can take control of the ersatz personal development the game requires of you. Let's dive in, shall we?

Note: People are telling me that this isn't a FAQ because I'm not answering any frequently asked questions. Those people can go pop a wheelie into a fire, I'm calling it a FAQ because it's not a guide because as mentioned I don't care about people's sad little personal lives; also people don't frequently ask me questions about stuff. Friggin' pedants.

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@***The Sarabande***@
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You might be wondering why it's strictly necessary to complete these quests- and if you're the type to sequence break, you can technically get by without them but WOW is that a bad idea. Maturity quests are, as you might know, part of learning the song of your land, which is necessary to wake your Denizen and get started with the whole Terraforming thing. And, because Sburb isn't especially creative, you learn parts of this song magically every time you complete one.
Yeah.
It's not all that simple, though, and the process is part of why you can't just try to find the song online or whatever. The parts of the song aren't predetermined- the composition of your song changes based on your choices, known as Heartjams (or sometimes Psyches). When you make a choice during a Maturity quest the game recognizes as "meaningful" (what that means depends on the quest in question), you'll learn a Heartjam automatically. This is like a little piece of a song. Usually this will take the form of a complete sequence of notes, composing something like a verse of the song. There are some situations where a particular Heartjam works in a different way with regards to the full song, like maybe it's a bass loop or a beat or something. Players of Rhyme and Flow are especially liable to have weird Heartjam composition and music... stuff. I'm no music-know-about guy, but depending on a number of factors you might be called upon to do more than just play all the parts in sequence.
You'll also find your Heartjams becoming important to loads of other stuff on your Land. Like, you know those Ceremonies the Land always wants you to perform? Playing Heartjams is frequently an unlock condition for dungeons, secret temple ruins, decrepit catacombs, etc. It's kind of like the player command system, only the game will call on you to do it whenever it feels like it. Only it gets a little mixed up but more on that later.
The Sarabande is... well, it's basically just the song of your land in an unfinished state. It's a term used to refer to the collection of Heartjams you've learned over the course of your maturity quests, and consorts kind of use it and the Song proper interchangeably. Your Sarabande will generally be completely unique to you, composed of loads of Heartjam fragments that reflect your growth as a person. Which is weird, because a sarabande is supposed to be a very specific kind of triple dance meter or whatever, not some magic maturity medley.
Before you can play your Sarabande to wake the Denizen, you'll need to complete a certain number of maturity quests. There's a number of ways to determine how close you are to completion.
1. The player command [Heartjelly] can be used to review the Heartjams you've acquired, and the pendant conveniently glows brighter when your Sarabande is more complete. Problem is, the command itself has to be unlocked with its own maturity quest, and it's possible to miss out on it if you make the wrong decision.
2. You can practice performing your Song/Sarabande at the Concert Halls on Derse and Prospit. Carapaces will give you feedback on your music and how close it feels to being "done". There's a carapace at each of these halls that will try to psychoanalyze you based on your music- which happens to be a stunningly helpful picture of what sort of quests you need to be looking for. Look for Peter Oscillo on Prospit and Walter Statley on Derse- the latter's kind of an asshole about it, though.
You'll need to become a patron of the Concert Hall to practice your music there. There's a number of ways to do this:
-Complete Mail Quest 18: Ship this sheet music!
-Get a letter of recommendation from an Agent of the kingdom or another patron- you'll need to really impress them with your music, though.
-Have super high carapace reputation and just ask
-Complete Earning Your Wings (not sure if this is a specific thing or a byproduct of the huge rep boost you get from all those dancing quests)
-Give the proprietor "an unreasonable amount of money". This will always be a couple orders of magnitude more than what you have at the time, so it's best to ask early when earning a whole Boonbuck is considered an achievement. Then you can pay him off later on for a pittance.
-Visit with another dreamer who's achieved patron status
The concert hall is useful for other things- players can grind their Verballistamina, music-triggered player abilities can be practiced, and you can choreograph dual Fraymotifs with another dreamer. Considering how much musical BS there is in Sburb, it's worth becoming a patron as soon as possible.
3. Playing the Song/Sarabande to a... uh, whatever those big Crystalantheblahs that heal you are called, will restore a little bit of health. [Song of Life] will always heal more, but you can measure completion by comparative health gained in case you don't want to bother becoming a concert hall patron and/or you've missed out on [Heartjelly].

Once you're reasonably certain your Sarabande is complete, you'll know you've completed enough maturity quests. There's always more you can do, if you're feeling unstable and also feel like surrendering your mind to the man, but at this point the song is done and you can go perform it up on the Promontory- more on that later. Completing further quests will continue to give you Heartjams, but they're not too useful beyond making the Song sound prettier. Are you ready to move on?

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@***Darkened Streets***@
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So, we know what you're getting out of these quests, now- aside from "maturity" which I'm still a little suspicious of. But how do you go about getting these?
Short answer: there's no real answer. Maturity quests can be more or less sought out- consorts hand out quests like there's no tomorrow, and the only real trick is figuring out which quests are the real deal and which are just like, finding their lost hat or some shit. Bearded or "elder" consorts tend to hand out maturity quests reliably (you know you're gonna hit maturity events when they refer to a quest as a [Trial] or [Deed]), but they can come from pretty much anywhere. Heartjam choices sometimes pop up when you're just doing whatever the fuck- you'll be on some quest and then suddenly you'll be presented with some big moral dilemma and then you get a Heartjam for your trouble. Ultimately, though, Maturity Quests are this whole big thing that got waaaaay too much attention during development- it'd be basically impossible to catalogue all the ways the game can drop them on you, since they're uniquely generated for each player.
Some titles are better at sniffing these out- tactician classes have good intuition on the matter and inheritor classes just can't stop tripping over the damn things. Mind, Heart and Fate also get that little intuition bonus.
For everyone else, you'll need to know about your Darkened Streets.
A Darkened Street is something like a character flaw. The point of maturity quests is to overcome these, by having them tested and sort of symbolically resolved-but-not-really. Sometimes it'll be a genuine test of character, but other times you'll just be directed to some mystical mumbo-jumbo and you'll do something with no clear meaning and then it'll be like "CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WON!" and you will suddenly feel more mature about that particular thing. It's kind of unnerving the first time it happens, and it never stops being a little too invasive and a little too convenient.
Each Darkened Street has a handful of associated Heartjams, which kind of thematically represent coping mechanisms or changes of heart. Like, let's use my first Street as an example: I got sent to this mystical zone that had this really loud annoying ringing noise that increased in pitch and volume the longer I stayed there. I was supposed to be "meditating", but I ended up getting irate and ollying out of there. Then I got a Heartjam called [Forward Movement], and felt... less stressed out. I went back to the bearded consort that gave me the quest, and he said that I had overcome the Street of Anxiety. I had three options- [Forward Movement], which represented indomitability and... moving forward. The options I didn't pick, according to him, were [Sweet Dreams, Timaeus] and [My Serenity]. [Sweet Dreams, Timaeus] corresponded to the choice of plugging my ears, humming something else, or pretending the noise wasn't there- it represents self-delusion, optimism, hoping for better. [My Serenity] was the choice to accept the noise and be unbothered by it- representing, as you might guess, serenity- being all zen and unflappable and shit. There's always a bunch of options- usually more than three. Some options are only "available" for certain classes/aspects, and sometimes a quest will stretch over multiple choices, and... it's probably more trouble than it's worth to catalogue these.
Darkened Streets occasionally aren't "flaws to overcome"- frequently you'll be playing a class/aspect that needs to embrace or master that Street- such as Greed for displacement classes or Deceit for Sand players. Picking options that conflict with your class or aspect will frequently cause you to FAIL the quest, forcing you to find a new quest for the same Street. Consistently picking the wrong option can sometimes result in earning the special Heartjam [The Price of Oblivion]. It'll almost always sound discordant in your Sarabande and result in a penalty to your Roleplay Coefficient, but if you're the stubborn type or don't want to play along with it all, you can get away with it.
Fun fact about Heartjams- a bunch of them have overlap with music-triggered player abilities, Player Commands, and Fraymotifs. Learning these heartjams can grant or boost these powers, but it's kind of minor- like turning in a card with a country you own in Risk, and getting an extra two armies there even though nobody cares about the garrison in Madagascar or whatever. [Sweet Dreams, Timaeus], for example, is also a Player Command that buffs the sleep ratio of other players nearby- basically a lullaby kind of thing. Careful not to get your Player Commands mixed up with the Heartjams required for special Ceremonies, though.

So, without further ado, I'm gonna list as many of the known Darkened Streets and their associated Heartjams as I can. Get ready for infoboxes aplenty!

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@ Darkened Street Name                                   @
@                                                        @
@ Description and notes: I'll put stuff here to describe @
@ the Street and any minor quirks.                       @
@                                                        @
@ [Heartjam] - description                               @
@ [Heartjam] - description, continued/more detailed      @
@ description of the choice                              @
@ [Heartjam] - description                               @
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...wow, ASCII is harder than it looks. Maybe I shouldn't bother with all the @ signs. Probably mess up non-fixed width stuff anyway.
Few more disclaimers: due to the nature of Sburb's personal growth focus thing, there are exceptions to almost every rule here. Think of these descriptions and associations as more of a pattern Sburb tends to follow, descriptions of what to expect rather than what's going to be there. The designers of Sburb seem to have put more effort into creating unique scenarios for these Maturity Quests than is really reasonable, so your personal journey is probably going to be a lot more complicated than tracking down X number of Streets and then playing the song.

What a mess.

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@***Streets and their Jams***@
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Anger
Anger, along with a few other Streets, suffers from a minor identification bug. Both Anger and Hatred, which are separate streets, are occasionally referred to by the game as "wrath". If a quest has been tagged with Wrath, pay careful attention to context to differentiate the two. Anyhow, Anger can mean violence, discontentment, blah blah come on everyone knows what Anger is. If you're not sure if it's Anger or Hatred, hatred tends to deal more with personal grudges.
{My Serenity} - You might notice the Zen approach shows up for almost every Street in the game.
{Catharsystem} - Taking out your anger on a target. Tends to be a disabled option unless you're playing a more destructive class/aspect.
{Fermentation} - Another all-purpose Heartjam, in which you hold back and internalize your struggle with the Street. I wouldn't recommend it just from a mental health standpoint.
{Chill Pill} - Easily mixed up with [My Serenity]. A more intentional sort of letting go of your anger, if that makes any sense. (Hint: it doesn't.)
{The Other Red Cheek} - Ordinarily reserved for Hatred (see why these two get confusing), represents becoming unconcerned with the source of your anger. Again, basically the same thing as [My Serenity] and [Chill Pill].
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Anxiety
Also suffers from an ID bug (as Stress) but thankfully Stress doesn't apply to anything else so it's p. much the same thing. Anxiety is being all worried and stressed out and overly concerned with things all the time.
{My Serenity}
{Put Your Mind at Ease} - Represents seeking out reassurance and discovering that things aren't as bad as they seem. Huge roleplay bonus to Life players and Oracle classes, but sometimes doesn't work because things actually ARE as bad as they seem. And frequently (because you ARE playing Sburb) worse.
{Extra, Extra} - Basically the same as PYME, but instead of seeking out info it's just... coming to a realization basically at random. And without the bonuses to Life and Oracles. Laaaaaaame!
{Sweet Dreams, Timaeus} - Ignoring reality and pretending that things are better than they seem. Stalwart optimism, with a bonus to Light players and also Rain, but Rain... see section c.b on [Null Sequitur]. Jeeeeez.
{Forward Movement} - Coming to terms with the reality of your X (in this case, worry), and moving forward to solve it and put things right.
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Apathy
The opposite of Anxiety, Apathy is when you flat out don't give enough of a shit. Doom players tend to have a lot of trouble with this.
{Extra, Extra} - Similar to Anxiety's version, only it's realizing HOLY SHIT, there's problems you need to solve. Extra Extra is kind of a bullshit auto-win option for maturity quests and I don't really know why it's there.
{Friendship is Paramount} - Focusing on the value of your coplayers, and resolving to help them. The Choice for this option is almost always a really dumb metaphor.
{Hate You} - See section c.b for the deal with this, but for some reason the bullshit self-loathing option shows up more here?
{Upward Gaze} - Finding a goal worth working for. "Beating the game" usually works unless you're especially apathetic or under Phrenic Fever.
{Get Up} - Also used for Sloth, and happens to boost the Flow player ability of the same name. Represents expanding your view of the world, or some crap like that. Similar to Forward Movement.
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Crudity
ID bug: Obscenity. Apparently Sburb gives a shit if you're fucking tossing around god damn swear words like a bitchtits motherfucker. Only, no it doesn't, and nobody knows why this type of maturity quest is even here. You usually only have to do it once, though, and you can ignore it after that.
{Friendship is Paramount} - Doesn't work if your friends don't give a shit (they shouldn't).
{Softly} - Realizing that you don't want to aggravate people with cuss words and dick jokes and shit. Not that anybody gives a shit unless you're doing like etiquette quests on your Dream Moon.
Those are the only two options and they're almost the same thing and nobody cares so ignore these dumb quests.
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Deceit
Lying about things. Have trouble telling the truth? If you're a Sand player, good job! If you're not, then hey how about try not to be a dick. Communication is like the single most important thing in this game, next to "don't try to fight your denizen you stupid fuckass".
{I Love Rogue} - Mostly just there for Sand players, who are required to embrace this kind of thing. Witches/mages can take advantage of it, too.
For some reason, [The Price of Oblivion] is renamed [Blazing Pants] for this Street.
{Friendship is Paramount]
{Thou Shalt Not} - a.k.a. "The Duty of Every Starfleet Officer". Treating the pursuit of truth as a moral absolute, and denying falsehood altogether.
{KISS} - Nothing to do with kissing. Keep It Simple, Stupid, so that you don't end up with a tangled web of lies that helps nobody. Also? The Heartjam fragment is inevitably COMPLETELY KICKASS in your Sarabande.
{King Know-it-all} - Taking pride in your exceptional knowledge of the truth, and feeling shame in concealing knowledge. Oracle roleplay bonus.
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Despair
ID bug: Sorrow. This is a big one for most players, and the one most commonly repeated. There's a high tolerance for "error", meaning you might end up doing these quests upwards of twenty times if you can't get over the terminal sads. And of course, you need your despair to open the Clockwork Contrivances. What a wash. Anyway, sadness encompasses all kinds of feeling blue, but mainly because your planet and everyone on it is dead. This tends to be a sticking point for players, and despite the high error tolerance it's the Street that most frequently ends up in a [The Price of Oblivion] Heartjam. There's a pretty huge number of choices available during these quests, though- they almost inevitably take place when you're actually just plain moping about something. Expect to run into this at the end of a dungeon, when you recover a memento of home and get bombarded by memories of the world you left behind.
Seriously. Sburb is an asshole.
{My Serenity}
{L'etat de l'ambivalence} - Pretty much just [My Serenity], only it's more "not caring" oriented than empty-headed zen or whatever. Allegedly. I've never earned [My Serenity] so who cares.
{Forward Movement}
{Catharsystem}
{Have a Good Cry} - This one's self-explanatory. Problem is, it generally doesn't actually help because it's not just your dog that died it was pretty much your entire universe so if you manage to get this Heartjam for real then good job being a heartless monster you huge crybaby. (...yeah, I'm just being bitter.)
{Friendship is Paramount}
{Upward Gaze}
{Put Your Mind at Ease} - Just in case your home planet miraculously survived. Pffffffffffffffffffffff
{Fermentation}
{At this point it would really be easier to just list the heartjams you can't use for this} - Like seriously, if you want a boost to one of those same-name player skills, pick it up here. There's no shortage of ways to fail to stop being sad.
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Envy
ID bug: Jealousy. It's practically the same thing as Longing, but it doesn't get mixed up in the Longing/Lust/Obsession ID bug crazy triangle somehow so that's nice. More focused on envying particular possessions of other people, and as you might expect Displacement classes get to embrace this with .
- While you can potentially use this to auto-win, in practice Thieves and Rogues will usually have to actually pilfer an object of their envy. If this object is a person (in a relationship with another player), this can lead to infighting and all sorts of problems. Displacement classes, just go Fermentation or The Price of Oblivion if that happens, it's not worth turning your session into a fucking soap opera.
{Fermentation}
{Friendship is Paramount}
{Eyes on the Prize} - Not really solving the problem of envy at all is the option that corresponds to envying some other thing a whole lot more than the original object of desire. If you want to complete the quest AND miss the point entirely, here you go.
{Vertical Motion} - Kind of the same as Upward Gaze, but more... active? Listen there's just a lot of vague duplicate Heartjams alright.
{Frustracean} - Kind of like PYME, where you discover that what you wanted wasn't all that great after all. Sour grapes and all that. Medium roleplay bonus for Hope.
{My Serenity}
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Fear
Pretty straightforward. The designers may have missed the point, though- [Fermentation] is IMO the real man's response to fear- doing the right thing even though you're peeing your pants in terror. It almost never comes up as its own choice, though. Fear has a wicked nasty bug with the Psychoruins, though- see the Glitches and Exploits section to learn how to avoid becoming a soulless fear husk.

{My Serenity}

{Friendship is Paramount}

{Sweet Dreams, Timaeus}
{Afraid of the Darko} - Exercising caution and keeping your fears at arm's length.
{A Taste For Adventure} - Getting a thrill out of fear and embracing it as an ally. Small roleplay bonus for active classes and Blood players.
{Harleboss} - Becoming so god damn powerful that nothing can pose a threat to you. Note that this is more of an intent kind of thing, you don't actually have to become a super invincible god for this (although I've heard of players scoring this heartjam by tiering).
{Phobian Extermination} - Facing a particular fear and getting the fuck over it already. Note: If you're playing something like Fate, Life, or Doom, you might get faced with an option where your phobia is the perfectly natural fear of death, and you'll be presented with the option to kill yourself. DO NOT DO THIS. What are you, an idiot or something?
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Greed
ID bug: Avarice. Displacement classes get to autowin with as usual. Actually how about I stop mentioning it individually and just list it in the misc section with all the Streets you can skip with it. Damn that thing is useful. Note: This can also apply to being power-hungry, and these quests are perfect for treating a player in the early stages of MeGaLoVania, along with Vainglory and Pride quests. Oh and yeah it's really similar to envy/jealousy/longing/lust/obsession, what else is new.
{My Serenity}
{Frustracean}

{Eyes on the Prize}

{Table of Contentment} - Learning to be satisfied with what you have. Always rubbed me the wrong way.
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Hatred
ID bug as Wrath, as previously mentioned. This is when you're carrying a grudge against another player, or potentially some game abstraction or whatever.
{Catharsystem} - If this is a Player grudge, for the love of god skip this option. Infighting is bad, friendship is paramount.
{Friendship is Paramount} - wheeeeee
{My Serenity}
{Chill Pill}
{Fermentation}
{The Other Red Cheek}
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Impatience
Now, this might be just me, but i think this one is just crazypants. Like, you're already having to kill a bunch of monsters and save your Land and try not to die and deal with all your other players, and the game gets up in your grill if you're not stopping to smell the goddamn roses? The game's gonna penalize you for getting a little restless? Oh no wait Restlessness is its own damn Street. Somebody just shoot me already.
{My Serenity} - Okay really should I stop listing this? Yeah I should. I'll put it under misc stuff and not go back and cut the other mentions out because pffff what is editing.
{Put Your Mind at Ease}
{Time on my Side} - Okay, this one is really only for Time players or people who've gotten mixed up in loops. If you're all worried about some problem you need to solve, you get to delegate to your future self. With time travel, apparently procrastination is a viable strategy.
{Statement of Intent} - The non-time version, kinda. You've got to have exceptional strength of will to earn this one- procrastinate better, hot damn!
{Downtime} - Either really easy or really hard to get, because it's just really nonspecific. Like, you gotta plain relax, but not for any particular reason? I don't get it. There's always Heartjams like this that "solve the problem" in the most generic way possible.
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Longing/Obsession/Lust
Uuuugh this is kinda dumb. The whole street is about letting go of desire, which I mean come on you have a completely OPPOSITE street called Apathy already, and two streets (greed/avarice and envy/jealousy) which are basically the same. And while Longing and Obsession are supposed to be functionally different (one being wrt something you don't have and the other being something you do) they have all the same Heartjams and their quest generation overlaps and they both get called Lust interchangeably, and greed and envy heartjams tend to work even though they're not like official quest options and aaaaaaaa
i'm going to stop complaining about how the game's street and heartjam definitions are vague and terrible and just, like, get the fuck on with it. like, just resign yourself to the fact that it's usually impossible to tell what action will correspond to what Heartjam and just try to roleplay right.
{Table of Contentment}
{I Love Rogue} - Mentioned again because it's a little different for Longing and Obsession. Longing will have you steal the thing in question, while Obsession just kinda gets skipped.
{Forward Movement} - Forcing yourself to leave your desire behind. Usually really easy to achieve- getting the fuck out of wherever the quest is taking place will score you this- sometimes even if that means going backwards. Roleplay bonus to Hope if it's Lust or Obsession.
{a whole bunch of greed or envy overlap heartjams}
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Paranoia
Paranoia's kind of useful in Sburb, because unlike back home where there's no monster under the bed, everything IS, in fact, trying to kill you. I would personally recommend every player of this game deliberately ramp up their paranoia levels (unless you're playing Fate in which case jesus just trust your aspect) to survive. But here we are with a street that actively hurts your chances of survival. Way to go!
{Heartjelly} - Here's what I advise everyone to grab. It's a pretty dependable heartjam- it's basically [Sweet Dreams, Timaeus] wherein you try to fool yourself that everything's fine. Only, Sweet Dreams is also a heartjam for this street so be careful. Close your eyes and concentrate really hard on how everything's going to be alright- Sweet Dreams is more passive. The important part here is that this is the only place to learn the [Heartjelly] player command, used to check on Sarabande completion. Unless it'd be a huge hit to your roleplay coeffecient, I highly advise everyone to pick this up.
{Sweet Dreams, Timaeus}
{Put Your Mind at Ease}
{Extra, Extra}
{Harleboss}
{Afraid of the Darko} - If you don't want to pick up Heartjelly, here's the option for embracing fear as an ally and stuff.
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Pride
Oh jeez, this one. Kinda similar to vainglory, but watchoo gonna do. Pride is pretty straightforward, and people who're truly humble will have an easy time with these. The problem (if it can be called that) is that Pride quests can have a damaging effect on both self esteem and drive- whatever the game does to mess with your head is going to make you "more goal-oriented" and inclined to help the team and move the game forward. I recommend avoiding these when possible if you're trying to do otherwise- any kind of game research, sequence breaking, level grinding or other "deviant behavior", because the game will literally install mental blocks that inhibit your willingness to do this stuff. Why it doesn't pull out all the Orwellian stops except for these quests is anyone's guess.
{Friendship is Paramount} - Quest options are surprisingly regular for Pride, if you've got a buddy- you'll typically be presented with some obvious challenge to your worth, and you'll need to ask your friend for help.
{Hate You} - Self-loathing maturity skip works pretty well here.
{Exhaustivity] - Corresponds to giving up on an obstacle after giving it everything you have.
{Lilliputianary Reaction} - Recognizing that you're not capable of doing everything yourself.
{Harleboss} - Generally only appears for Dreams players, but... sometimes the game just recognizes that you really are that awesome, and lets you through.
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Restlessness
A vaguer sort of Impatience, less focused on a particular thing so much as not wanting to wait or for things to stagnate. Usually the first maturity quests passive-spectrum classes will encounter, if they're too unruly for their role. Similar to Impatience (as you might have guessed) minus [Statement of Intent] and any particularly active Heartjams.
{Downtime}
{Time on my Side}
{Put Your Mind at Ease}
{Forward Movement} - Ignoring the maturity here, available only for Explorator classes or players with the Stars aspect.
{Fermentation}
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Sloth
The opposite of restlessness and impatience, and similar to Apathy, only it's less about not caring as much as not caring ENOUGH.
{Upward Gaze}
{Forward Movement}
{Extra, Extra}

{Get Up}
{Goo Goo G'joob} - Beatles reference? Or something to do with the Others? Either way, it's sort of... what you get if you're just really not at all slothful, but you ran into the quest anyway. This is probably here because the Moon Quest {Lap of Luxury} automatically triggers a Sloth choice if you spend too long in the Just Right Bed. No, I don't know why it's called that.
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Vainglory
MeGaLoVania: The Street. That's basically it- a special kind of Pride regarding achievement in the game itself, worshiping one's own accomplishments, and refusing to sweat the small stuff.
{Lilliputianary Reaction}
{Harleboss} - An option, yeah. I don't know why the hell it's there, since I can't think of a reason to reward the player for totally failing on the first try, but there you go. Players actually suffering from MGLV aren't going to be helped by this quest.
{Downtime}
{All the Pretty Little Ponies} - Learning to appreciate your quest and the antics of consorts and carapaces. Getting more "down to earth", you know?
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Whimsy
Not a character flaw, I think? If your head's just plain not screwed on right, and you do stuff just because you feel like it... well, you're probably a Rain or Fate player. Both of whom can use [Null Sequitur] here, so there you go. Anyway, this is Sburb's way of telling you to be less crazy, and it's probably right.
{Put Your Mind at Ease}
{KISS}
{Extra, Extra}
{Time Running By} - Kind of like Forward Movement- realizing that you don't have time to indulge your flights of fancy, and getting the fuck on with things.
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@***Miscellaneous Heartjams***@
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There's a lot of general-purpose Heartjams in the game that can apply to just about any Street under the right conditions. Exploiting these is highly recommended when possible, unless you want your Sarabande to sound all pretty and/or actually play the game the way it's meant to be played. (pfffff) Feel free to let me know (spacetimeCounselor on Pesterchum) if you've encountered additional Heartjams- this guide is by no means complete, since we're working from... like, about thirty players' worth of data. 

{Hate You}
Okay, so, this is the most egregiously bonkers Heartjam as far as I know. [Hate You] can be earned pretty much universally- it generally corresponds to intense feelings of self-loathing. Yeah, apparently low self-esteem is not a Darkened Street, but an all-purpose remedy for literally any maturity problem- a panacea for personality flaws. This is... either really reflective of the game's fucked-up perspective on maturity, or something that was supposed to be removed but wasn't. Thankfully, it's one of the more easily-faked options, if you've got the underlying feelings- just vocally moaning about how pathetic you are seems to do the trick. It's not bad in your Sarabande, either- kind of lilting and lovely and other L words that I love to lay out to laud my loquaciousness.
Still, Sburb does unconsciously reinforce your choices (moreso than basic human behavior reinforcement does), so trying to score [Hate You] too often can mess the fuck with your head and lead to feelings of suicide (which doesn't work thanks to exiles, but there you go), resentment, and, in the event that you really truly don't actually hate yourself much, a psychotic break that's likely to put you on a PK spree. Generally, scoring [The Price of Oblivion] is a better idea, unless you're really just trying to speed through your maturity quests- which is missing the point, if the point is a thing you care about.

{Fermentation}
This is the bottling-up one- it's not super dangerous by itself, but if you overuse it you're liable to end up with a whole lot of suppressed negativity- perfect fuel for a Berserk Trigger (which is often "fated" to happen anyway) or just a general break with reality that makes you go psycho and all. If you find yourself relying on this, you'll want your friends spamming you with psy-buffs a lot.

{Null Sequitur}
Hahaha, this one is fun. Let's get this out of the way- Rain Players? You basically get to forget all about maturity, and just cackle your way to the finish line- claiming victory through total unfettered insanity. Acting like a total nutjob will earn you this Heartjam in just about every situation- and you get a pretty huge roleplay coefficient bonus for it, too! In fact, while actually growing up as a person is kind of on hold for you, you'll want to do maturity quests as often as possible- the coefficient boost is great for ability casting. Unless, of course, you rely on it too much, in which case it becomes predictable and you lose coefficient, as if you were playing Dreams. But... not all the time, because following rules is for suckers apparently. Anyway, Witch, Mages, and sometimes Rage players can shoot for this Heartjam in certain situations, but it's not nearly as all-encompassing as it is for Rain players. Lucky sons of fucks.

{I Love Rogue}
Previously mentioned, this Heartjam applies to Displacement classes (Thief and Rogue) as well as Sand players- and Cryptic classes in some situations. Certain Streets like Greed, Envy, the L/O/L triumvirate, and especially Deceit must be embraced for you to roleplay properly, so the game provides a workaround. Basically you got to be a total fuckin' scoundrel all the time and get away with it. isn't automatic, though- you'll need to identify the correct choice or else take a roleplay hit.

{www&--;}
Glitched Heartjam, shows up in Vainglory, Restlessness, Fear and Paranoia. Pretty harmless, it's just you'll occasionally be in the middle of making a choice and then suddenly auto-win. There's no associated music bit, usually, but thankfully that just means you don't need to worry about it rather than having to incorporate silence into your composition.

{My Serenity}
Your maturity has been kidnapped by Sburb! Are you a Zen enough dude to rescue your maturity? This one seems to activate specifically for like, the whole proper meditation and mind-clearing exercise, and being like really all kinds of spaced out and not giving a shit. It'll work for almost everything but Sloth and Apathy, for obvious reasons. Sitting around doing nothing doesn't work by itself, so unless you've really got what it takes you're out of luck. Fun fact: players afflicted with the DERP can totally score this one, if they have the presence of mind to be on quests in the first place. Anyway, hey dudes, thanks for listening to me. Let's go for a burger.... ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

{The Price of Oblivion}
As mentioned, it's what you get if you just completely fail at personal growth. The game doesn't want to slow you down if you're already bothering to go on these quests, so they give you a failure option. Frequently, though, the game won't decide you're done- more often than not, if you fail at lighting a Darkened Street, it'll just give you another quest on the same street later, especially in the case of Despair. And then, even if you do pick this up, they'll slap you with the Street a few more times for good measure until they're sure you're good and stable in your personal development.
What a fuckin' drag.

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@***Glitches and Exploits***@
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Welcome to Sburb, everything is horribly coded and totally broken basically all the time, so shit will get wrecked and you're going to have to deal with it. Here's some major pitfalls to look out for, and convenient tricks you can use to make things easier for yourself.
-EXPLOIT/WARNING: Don't take shortcuts-
Heart players! You guys... kind of can break the system. You can go ahead and tweak your own Shiny (or those of teammates) to satisfy the more abstract quest requirements (those that require you to just feel a certain way rather than take a specific representative action). I'd like to warn you not to do that, because it's just as scary-brainwashy as what the game normally does, if not more. And also messing with the Shiny to modify complex traits like emotions is inherently risky and can have horrible consequences- but this is Sburb, horrible consequences are pretty much everywhere no matter what you do. Still, bad idea.
-EXPLOIT: Stock up on sister streets-
When the game initializes a maturity choice event, it doesn't pick one decision for one Darkened Street. While the quest itself is usually invisibly tied to a certain Street, the decision is a separate entity that signals all active maturity quests. Usually, the choice structure will be specific enough to only flag one, but if you've got a bunch of similar quests going on at once, you'll frequently end up triggering multiple Heartjams. Envy/Longing/Lust/Obsession/Greed/Avarice/Jealousy is the big one- they pretty much all respond to

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@***Later, dudes***@
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So by now you've hopefully got a handle on how all this works. To recap: Find quests, make choices, get Heartjams, compose Sarabande, wake your Denizen, and then try not to get killed by everything else the game throws at you. Make sure to keep track of how your personal journey changes you, because you might miss it if you're not paying attention. There's a lot of room to direct your growth within the system, but it'll never turn out the way you thought it would. Watch out for glitches, and be smart about your choices. Who knows? Maybe you'll learn something.
[ADDENDUM].future(): irc's gonna give me hell for this, but it's worth mentioning i basically skipped everything i possibly could; i'll be honest and say a hell of a lot of my info comes from doomed selves- i don't trust the game any further than i can throw it, so i opted for the bare minimum for my Song and kept this game's big brother mind control tendrils as far away from my head as possible. most of you are gonna want to just play the game "right" and stay safe and sound, but if you want to stick it to the Man/Omnipotent doom game, just know you're in for a hard time. these quests are where they do most of the messing with your head, so watch out
ADDENDUM from the present instead of whatever time hacking future me is doing: dude you know i'm gonna be the one catching flak for telling people not to trust the game right
[ADDENDUM].future(): yeah well if sheeple want to keep everyone's eyes closed that's their perogative, so just fuckin deal with it
ADDENDUM (still the present): when exactly did i start being an asshole, again

Your Strife Specibus And You: An Introduction
by Dom’Laad Shas’ui
[43C]
**===========================================================================**
**                                I - FORWARD                                **
**===========================================================================**

Combat, (or "Strifing", as Sburb calls it) is an integral part of your life as a Sburb Replayer. Though of course you can use your Aspect in combat, you will also often find yourself using weapons. These weapons are wielded using the game abstraction called your "Strife Specibus".

**===========================================================================**
**                     II – WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION                     **
**===========================================================================**

There are many things you do not know about strife specibi (the technically correct pluralization of "specibus"). Accurate and detailed knowledge of the subject will give you an advantage when fighting difficult enemies, and has a high ( >72%) probability of increasing your life expectancy by an appreciable margin (2 Terran Standard months or more). A casual survey of replayers from five sessions showed that a distressing percentage of them were not even aware that there was a limit to the number of strife specibi they could use at any one time. Reading this informative primer on the subject and committing its details to memory is a task of critical importance to everyone.
It is important to note that there is a distinct level of cognitive dissonance regarding strife specibi that is imposed on the player by Sburb, itself. Players commenting on the incredulity that they are prevented from using certain weapons and yet are proficient in the use of others without training is a thing of which essentially nothing has been heard (5 known unprompted instances across 214 polled sessions). This is most likely due to the "aura of normalcy" that the game imposes on all player/game abstraction interactions in order to ease the flow of play and reduce the learning curve for new players. Only dual-natured (organic/synthetic) life forms appear to have the necessary perspective to make objective observations without the idea being implanted by an outside source.

**============================================================================**
**                              III - THE BASICS                              **
**============================================================================**

First, let me cover a few things of which you should already be aware, simply for the sake of thoroughness and the potential new player who has not yet entered the Medium (a topic not covered in this introduction).
A strife specibus is the term for a type of weapon that Sburb recognizes can be used by a player. It is a game abstraction, not an object that can be physically located. They can be picked up, discarded, traded, and modified by Sburb as an interpretation of player actions, but players cannot technically interact with them because they are not physical objects.
Strife specibi are categorized into "kinds". Each "kind" allows you (the player) to equip and use weapons of a particular type. For example, the "pistolkind" specibus allows the player to equip and use pistols of all kinds. Similarly, the "bowkind" specibus allows the player to equip and use bows of all kinds. Some specibi are more general or specific than others, and some weapons can be used across different specibi (occasionally wildly differing ones). This has functional differences that will be covered in a later section.
It is important to note that Sburb gives you competence in weapons once they have been slotted into your strife specibus. For example, if a player with the "swordkind" specibus picks up a rapier for the first time and puts it in his sylladex, he will have no idea how to actually use it in combat. Once he inserts it into his swordkind strife specibus, however, he will immediately be granted knowledge and proficiency in its use relative to that specibus' Proficiency Bonus and Rating. (Proficiency Bonus and Rating will be covered in a later section.) Similarly, a player attempting to use a weapon not compatible with any of their strife specibi will find themselves unable to fathom even the simplest tasks using it, and is more likely to harm themselves than anyone or anything else. (Even the ground, improbable though that appears.)
Weapons stored in a strife specibus are game abstractions and are rendered incorporeal. This is identical to items stored in the player's sylladex, and subject to the same rules. They take up no physical space and have no mass, but can appear and be ready to use nearly instantaneously (less than .025 seconds, the recording speed of the observing instrument used for experiment).

**============================================================================**
**                         IV - STRIFE SPECIBUS STATS                         **
**============================================================================**

Most players do not consciously realize that there are stats inherent to each strife specibus. Those that do, usually only comprehend one or two elements but miss the remainder. There are five stats: Type, Number of Slots, Damage Bonus, Proficiency Bonus, and Rating.
==>Type
This is the one that most players accept without realizing it. The specibus' Type is the word (or series of words) in the name that describes what manner of weapon falls under that specibus. In the "pistolkind" example from before, the specibus' Type is "pistol".
==>Number of Slots
The second stat is the one that players are most likely to consciously understand. Each strife specibus has a limited number of inventory slots for the player to use when equipping weapons. Each slot is capable of storing one weapon or matched set (two or more weapons intended to be used together, such as dual fancy santas or a sword and shield combination). When every inventory slot is filled, an existing slot must be emptied in order for a new weapon to be stored. Different specibi have different numbers of slots, and there are even different versions of the same Type with differing numbers of slots.
==>Damage Bonus
This is the first of the stats that is not immediately apparent to players. This stat is "hidden", not displayed at any point in any area of the game. Hacking the specibus can allow players to read the value in this stat, but it will autocorrect any attempts to overwrite it, short of [purple prose]. The Damage Bonus stat tends to be higher on specibi that are less overtly useful in combat. For example: "knifekind" receives almost no damage bonus, "batkind" receives only a small damage bonus, and "plushiekind" receives a damage bonus that must be seen to be believed. This appears to be a balancing feature to encourage players to use more imaginative and entertaining weapon types, though the utter lack of documentation about the feature renders that somewhat unlikely (<21% chance). (Yes, "plushiekind" is a strife specibus. A very rare one, but it does exist.)
==>Proficiency Bonus
The second "hidden" stat, each strife specibus bestows a level of proficiency with weapons of the appropriate Type. It appears to take effect immediately upon placing the weapon in the proper inventory slot, and lasts for as long as the player possesses the specibus. The Following Statement Is Of the Utmost Importance: The Proficiency Bonus of each strife specibus is directly proportional to the specificity of its Type. The more restrictive the Type is, the more skill with its use is granted to the player. The more permissive the Type is, the less skill is granted. One of the most sought-after strife specibi, "jokerkind", allows the user to equip and use any weapon across which they come, but actually has a negative net effect on the user's skill (relative to their pre-game skill with the same weapon, plus any additional training that has been completed since entering).
==>Rating
Last is the hidden stat for the player's Rating with that specibus. This is the only stat that changes. Rating is a measurement of how experienced a player is with using a given specibus, and functions as a multiplier to your Damage and Proficiency bonuses. Rating is measured from E (lowest rating) to A (highest rating). Some highly restrictive Types allow players to increase their rating beyond A, granting them gamebreakingly high bonuses for using those weapons. Each successive rating beyond A adds a + sign to the end, in the pattern "A+, A++, A+++".
Rating is increased randomly. Each time the player gains a level on their Echeladder, Sburb takes the specibus they have used the most in the last level and compares a randomly generated number against a target number for the next Rating level. If the random number is higher, the Rating level is increased. If the target number is higher, the random number is stored and added to the next random number. (This can result in either very fast or very slow Rating increases, but usually comes out in the middle for all non-Light players.)
Rating is reset when selecting the "Replay" option at the conclusion of the game, but a small portion ( <10%) of the number values generated for increasing the Rating level appears to be carried into the new session. This explains why new players have to learn everything all over again, but experienced players can leap back into using their favorite weapons quickly.
==>Strife Specibus Limit
Most players figure out at some point that they are limited to having three different strife specibi and are unable to discard them easily, but they are actually incorrect (100% wrong). The default number of strife specibi that a player is able to equip simultaneously is three, but there is a series of consort quests that culminates with the Consort Weaponmaster granting the player a fourth strife specibus at Rating D. The granted specibus is of a random Type, and may be a duplicate of a Type already possessed by the player. Some Types can only be obtained in this way. This quest series is often overlooked because the quest giver (Weaponmaster's Initiate) already gave the player a completed quest series, and the opening quest is only available for a short period of time (average 14.2 hours with a 95% confidence interval of 4.3 hours).
This fourth strife specibus is treated identically to the preceding three in all respects. When selecting "Replay" and being sent to a new session, a strife specibus will be discarded at random until the player is back down to three. (Normally this results in the loss of only one, but there is one reported case of a glitched player accumulating twenty-two strife specibi across multiple sessions before Sburb corrected its mistake.)

**=========================================================================**
**                       V – FINAL NOTES (IMPORTANT)                       **
**=========================================================================**

OFFLINE

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||=================[43D]================||
||====== Self Prototyping and You ======||
||===============dzoneWolf==============||
||======================================||

Welcome, ladies and gents, gaydies and hoes. Also any of you cishets out there, though let's be real, I’ve never met a single SBURB player who was. This is my own, custom-made, chapter on, drum roll please, SELF PROTOTYPING!
For those of you who DON’T know, self prototyping is when you throw your dreamself into the sprite after entry. Or pre-entry, if temporal bullshit lands you a dead dreamself in your house sometime before the game starts. Either or.
There are a MULTITUDE of problems with this, but depending on what you put in first, the benefits CAN outweigh the problems. Let’s start with the biggest problem.
It interferes with your sprites programming. The dreamself was never meant to merge with the sprite. In theory, your sprite should be double prototyped by the time your dreamself is able to get anywhere near it. The two’s programming cancels eachother out, the Sprite is, afterall, supposed to fuck off to never never land within the first week or two of the game, without this glitch the longest I’ve seen one stick around was a month. With this? Your sprite never leaves. The sprite pendent? Whether or not it works is up for debate. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Doesn’t matter too much, since so long as you have the sprite, they can play the funky little tunes for the player commands. So long as you can convince them. Because remember, this is the part of you you don’t want to confront, the part of you that went “Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you just wanna go apeshit?” Okay, that experience isn’t universal, but that’s been mine everytime. Point is, your dreamself can be really uncooperative. That’s before factoring in whatever you put in first.
One of my native ectofamily was a Grace of Light. She prototyped the local First Guardian (AKA the debug npc, AKA the fucker with the white text and green lightning). The FG was, to put it bluntly, an asshole. We later found out he’d been messing with our lives since we landed on old Terra, and was responsible for, oh, about seventy to eighty percent of the horrible things that happened to us. This tendency to fuck with us persisted into being a sprite. Circumstances occurred such that my dreamself ended up in the sprite with him. I will admit, as a native Prince of Mind, I had my fair share of shitty tendencies. Fusing with that bastard only made them worse.
It took me another round of maturity quests to fix my shit after I godtiered.
About that, the one major upside of self prototyping. When you godtier, you fuse with the other half of the sprite, it’s powers become yours, blah blah blah, with great power comes great responsibility and all that shit.
I got horrific powers that let me counter the fuck up our Grace made, and nigh limitless knowledge. Different prototypings will grant different boosts, knew a chick who prototyped a cat, she got new ears, better senses, better reflexes, and the way that girl could bend? Unf.
But yeah, that’s on the good end of things. You could, I dunno, toss in a guide to the horrorterrors and come out of it looking like you stepped out of a hentai and drive people insane with a glance. Or some other nightmarish bullshit.
And that’s not accounting for the damage it can do to your head.
Because it turns out, linking your mind to Skaia can cause overload and drive people insane. Knew a Seer of Life who self prototyped with a computer. He came out of it barely coherent, and when he DID start to move around on his own again? He was obsessed with acting out “Skaia’s Will” which was apparently killing every single carapacian he encountered, and when we tried to stop him, us as well.
So yeah, let me just put down a list.

Pros | Cons
_____________________________________+_____________________________________
|   Cool Powers On Top Of Your Godtier|You Risk Losing Your Mind            |
|          You Keep Your Sprite Around|It Fucks With The Sprites Programming|

I’m sure there’s shit I’m forgetting, but I’m running on twenty-three sessions and I’ve self prototyped every time, so any major problems have probably fucked me up beyond the point of noticing it. If I remember and/or encounter anything else, assuming it doesn’t kill me, I’ll update this with the new information.

[Admin]

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This chapter will deal with unpleasant business. Death is a part of everything, sure, but Sburb cranks the whole thing up to eleven. People die in Sburb. In fact it is everybody's favorite pastime and you're going to die too. The part that sucks is when people die permanently. Nope, they won't come back if you win the game. Sometimes people just die and you have to deal with it. This chapter will cover this subject.
Dealing with a player death can be broken down in three steps.
==>Confirm the death
==>Retrieve the pendant

==>The game must go on

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The first thing to do when someone goes down in Sburb is to confirm the death. Otherwise, you're gonna wear out your tear ducts before the end of your first playthrough. As it turns out, the concept of death is a little watered down in this game. There are many factors that can fake death, cheat death, delay death, subvert death, undo death or just plain make it irrelevant.

Therefore, before you take any action, you want to properly confirm if someone suffered a death or if someone permanently died. These are different things in Sburb. The first one is like "oops I died again" because this game is weird like that, the other one is being dead and out of the story. It's still something that can happen. In certain FAQs, being permanently dead is sometimes called permadeath but I am not fond of the term. It just sounds silly. I suppose that it's useful when you really need to be technical and stuff but most people agree that it's not a word that should exist in a serious conversation. It just doesn't click with the mood when people, like, die and never come back. Instead it's better to just say :
"…he/she's not coming back, isn't it?"
Simple, clean, it gets the idea across.

Once you have confirmed a player's death, you have a job to do. You have to retrieve the pendant off the player's corpse. Once you got that out of the way, you may have a corpse party with the dead body if that's your kinda thing. THEN you can take a deep breath and make peace with the concept of player mortality. I'm going to touch the subject in a chapter but there isn't much to say about it. The game must go on.

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If a person dies right in front of you, it's pretty great. Confirming death just got a whole lot easier and you can recover the pendant on the spot if necessary.
If the now-dead player was ascended, it's common courtesy to not touch the body. Depending on some vague factors that are barely worth debating, the person might spontaneously come back to life. It's a process that can be slow and dull, like the ticking of a grandfather clock. If you want to play it safe, give it an hour at most. If there's still no lightshow after one hour, you can pack your things. Start by ganking the sprite pendant from the body. Yoink.
If the player that died was not God Tier, apply the revival procedure and then wait. I mean it's not like there's a whole lot of things you can do except waiting. You just want to see if some crazy game plot shit will kick into gears. Just hang around there and poke the body with a stick or something. I don't know. If it's not moving then it's not moving. Gank the sprite pendant.
Once you're in possession of the sprite pendant, squeeze it with your hand while thinking out loud about "sup bro". It's called pinging. If the owner of the pendant is still alive, the pendant will glow. It'll even give you a vague impression of the direction where you can find the pendant's owner. If it points toward several directions at once, it's because you have some shenanigans going on. It may be that the player that died was just one out of many. It happens often with Time/Rain players.

If the person did survive, you should return the pendant whenever you can. If the person didn't make it, well you just got a new bunch of responsibilities.

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I'm gonna drop it like it's hot: the majority of permadeaths in Sburb occurs when people are alone on their Land. It's always the same story. These guys start to get too cocky, they try to bite more than they can chew (or that they can even fit in their mouth) and then they get ahead of the corpse party.
Sburb isn't a single-player game. The farther you go in the game, the more you need to team up. The roleplaying chapters should clarify some of that stuff. Anyway: it's always the guys who are alone that blow their chances at a happy ending.
The part that sucks is that these guys just go missing and you're not sure if they're dead or not.
Most people say that you should presume that people died when they stop showing up at the regular session meetings. Personally I say that you don't have to look that far. I think you can start to assume death when people stop showing up online for a while.
I mean, what the hell, in this day and age and with the whole alchemy thing, everybody has computers. Your glasses are computers, your shoes are computers, your clothes are computers. Everything is a god damn computer. So if you got someone who isn't connected to the internet for 24 hours, well god damn, that guy is as good as dead. If it wasn't Sburb that did it, then it was internet withdrawal symptoms.

This is the part where it gets tricky: when someone goes missing, you want to be able to confirm the death indirectly. There are several tricks for doing so, which are going to be discussed in the rest of this chapter. If you are a Space Player or a Seer, get out, this chapter is for people who have boring regular eyes that can only see straight ahead.

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The Land check is the common procedure for indirectly confirming whether people ditched you for the corpse party. Sburb Lands are tied to the welfare of their owner. Whenever a person dies, you can usually tell by visiting their Land.
A player who has died will leave behind something called a dead Land. A dead Land has a dark sky, it has no underlings, it has no consorts, the scripts are all inactive (so even the puzzles don't work) and everything is completely silent. So yeah, that's pretty dead.
If you feared that winning the game requires that everybody clears their Land, you can sigh in relief. If you got a dead player, you don't need to complete that person's Land quests. I don't know what the dead guy's coming of age story was supposed to be, but I can tell you that it's a story that ain't getting told.

So forget about all that stuff for now. Right now, you just want to visit the land of a missing person to check out the sky. If the sky is clear, then it's likely that the player is still alive, somehow and somewhere. False alarm. If it's all dark, buckle up soldiers.

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A clear sky is a proof of life but the opposite isn't true. A dark sky doesn't shed any light on the situation. There are many factors that can black out a Land while the owner is still alive and kickin'.
For example, maybe the Land is naturally dark. Maybe the person is just asleep all the time. Maybe it's part of denizen damage, maybe it's part of a puzzle. Maybe an endgame ability from the Aspect of Law is shrouding everything in darkness. Or worse, maybe it's interference from the Others. That shit has a tendency to create large patches of darkness that block out everything, even scrying. You'll find these zones around corrupted Players that are in a state of rampancy.
All of these things can make you mistake a Land for being dead when it isn't, if you only look at the sky.
Hence, if you find a dark Land then you need to explore it. Check if it's empty of life. The way that dead Lands empty themselves is a gradual process. It's like reverse-spawning. Stuff vanishes when you aren't looking at it. So if the death was recent, it's possible that a Land hasn't finished going into grief. You could still spot some silent/mournful imps or consorts that will vanish when you turn your back on them.
The last thing to disappear is usually the denizen (if it is still alive). If the denizen hasn't vanished yet and you meet it, it will be completely silent and it will nod if you ask whether the owner died.

Additionally, you may meet the sprite of a deceased player. It will silently hand you over a sprite pendant and then it'll ollie outie god knows where.

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There are going to be situations where you just don't know if someone died or not. Scouting their Land might prove too glitchy to be conclusive. Additionally, a Land check is not final on the matter. Even if you find a dark, empty Land, you can't completely rule out foul play. It's still possible that the empty Land is caused by some rare/specific glitch that mimics this sorry state of affair.
There is a last method to clear away any doubt whether someone died or survived. For that, you need to visit the underworld of that person's Land.
When a player dies, their Land will automatically release the hoard (if it wasn't released yet). Hence, Skaia still has the necessary creative potential for the Ultimate Reward. It's the reason why you can still win the game even if you lose players. When that hoard is released, in fact, it's because the gates to the underworld will open by default.
Hence, you're free to check up on the underworld. Trekking through the underground of a dead Land isn't a leisure trip. However it can be necessary if you need to confirm something with your own eyes.
If the owner of a Land has died, there won't be any Heart in the center of the Land.
No Heart, no player. The Heart of a Land is in sync with the heart of its owner. Essentially, you're confirming cardiac arrest. That sounds pretty final to me.

If a player is in an… alternative state of existence, there could be a Heart in the Land that is not beating. Don't ask me where all these ghosts, robots and ghost robots come from. But if there's no Heart at all then there's no player assigned to that Land. If there was supposed to be one, then that person's gone.

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You can alternatively seek to prove or disprove that a player died by trying to find their dreamself. Normally, they die along with their owner. This triggers a special dream moon event, the Procession, which is like the bastard child between a funeral and some kind of shitty fundraiser, complete with slow walking in the streets and shouting a slogan.
It may take a few days before a Procession takes place. Like all dream events, it's dependent on the alignment of the dream worlds. For that reason, it shouldn't be your choice method to confirm death. You may have to wait a few days before the proper funerals actually take place for a dreamself.

The Procession can also be misleading: it's possible that a player's dreamself has died but not the realself. The link only goes one way. If you're lucky, maybe the carapace people can tell you what happened to their Prince or Princess.

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Okay so you have good reasons to believe that a missing person is dead. Now you're one player short. The mobius reach around of the session is broken and there might be Duties that aren't anywhere close to getting done.
This is a pretty shitty state of affair. Your immediate task is to fix it. You can cry later.
Your job right now is to form a retrieval team and seek out a corpse on a dead world shrouded in shadows. It's not a fun job but the game must go on. Start by organizing a team meeting to announce the bad news. Next, check if anybody wants to volunteer for the retrieval job (spoiler, nobody will). Next, bring out the straws and hope you don't pick the short one.

If your luck is anything like mine, you're screwed. Hopefully there won't be any complications while you recover the pendant. The next chapter will cover said complications that will invariably be there.

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Normally, angels just chill around the Heart of the Land, fluttering there like moths attracted to a flame. The worst they do is swoop down and scream at passersby. Then they return to being useless twerps in the fake-sky. I'm not sure why we care so much about these things. They're like flies buzzing around.
The problem arises when you have a dead Land. The Heart's gone and the angels stop being attracted to the empty space in the middle of the Land. Add the fact that the underworld entrances are now open and you have a potential problem. You can stumble on a blurry angelic asshole on the surface while you're on a pendant retrieval mission. Oh it's rare, but there's always something rare that is going on. I just hope you don't get this one.
If you encounter this scenario, my advice is that you act very carefully. Every decision is important when you deal with these things and you'll need some major sleuth diplomacy to get around the problem. If worst comes to worst, remember that angels are not completely invincible. It is technically possible to destroy them. It's just the last thing you want to try, believe me.
If you have a Rogue or Thief title, this situation is right up your alley. You want to gank that pendant and ollie outie without dragging the attention of a winged dildo. You'll get a huge roleplay bonus out of the scenario. Alternatively, you can try to rope your Rogue/Thief players on the job.

Note: avoid sending a corrupted player to a dead Land with angel activity. For many reasons.

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This is an even rarer bug that happens once in a blue moon. You'll probably never face it. This bug causes a dead Land to react very badly to losing its owner. I would make a metaphor here about the Land going in rigor mortis, but it's more like a zombie apocalypse to be honest. This condition is vaguely known as a Land that has gone angry. It's a cheesy way to put it and it undermines the severity of the situation.
A Land that is angry is a world that completely flips out after the death of its owner instead of going down silently. The Land will be completely dark and fogged up. Its landmarks will overgrow until it's like a jungle in there. Its spawning rates will go crazy and it will create hissing, moaning Ohgodwhats (Underlings all merged together into a hulking mass) everywhere that you go. You will have to keep absconding and running since you cannot hope to defeat all of these things. The Land will also have ghost consorts; a graphic glitch where the head of consorts will protrude from solid objects. All they do is continually mutter broken parts of dialogs while staring at you.
Finally and most annoyingly, the "nightmare" script that is normally tied to the Psychoruins is going to leak everywhere. The Psychoruins is a stupid optional area that tries to mimic B horror movies and most people don't care to complete it. You encounter some kind of hallucination script there, called nightmares. It can take anything from your head and pretend that it's real as long as it freaks you out.
It's mildly funny/interesting when you're in the psychoruins but you shouldn't have to deal with that crap along with an angry Land. For example, it's not because you find your buddy on an angry Land that it's your real buddy. It also sucks that the leaking Psychoruins script blanks out communications. Chatting, communication commands, scrying and even pinging.
My only advice here is to keep a strict policy of clean pants and find that pendant ASAP.
The angriest part of the Land will usually be around the corpse of the dead Player. It's like the Land is going batshit and jealously guarding the body. At least you always have a good hunch of where to go: it's the direction where everything gets worse. This whole farce is over once you can reach the dead body so just get your hands on that pendant. Then the ghost consorts will go silent, the hallucinations will freeze and the Ohgodwhats will stop in their track and stare at you. Just put on the pendant and everything around you will start to vanish into broken pixels while the daylight returns.
Then you can call another team meeting, show them the pendant and say that everything was a piece of cake. It was just another boring retrieval. Nothing happened, ha ha, nothing at all.

God I hate this glitch.

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Okay so you recovered some bling bling. Now you want to know what to do with it. Well it's simple. The unwritten rule to pendant ownership is finder's keeper. You recover a pendant? You put it around your neck.
The purpose of retrieving pendants is more or less the equivalent of taking someone else's burdens. It's far from being a power up. I mean, I wish that it was some kind of power up. But it isn't.

It's just more responsibilities. In other words, you're gonna carry that weight. You have a new client player waiting for you and maybe some new duties. You have to complete stuff that the person didn't have the time to complete. And hopefully, you'll be able to see it through to spare the next poor bastard from having to loot your bling bling.

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It's not because a corpse had a single pendant that it is necessarily that person's pendant. Sometimes, two players decide to swap pendants with each other. I guess that it's cute and it works in theory. The promise here is that the two players always stick together and ping each other's location if they get separated. You know, BROS 4 LYFE.

I am totally into this concept, don't get me wrong. I mean this is right up Might's alley. But I don't really advocate these kinds of shenanigans. There's always something that goes wrong. Meanwhile, just double check the color of the pendants you find.

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Some people have the GENIUS idea that if they're about to die, they should leave their pendant behind. You know, the kind of situation were shit hits the fan and said fan is on the ceiling so the shit rains back all over your heads and nobody's got a hat and you're surrounded by deadly monsters with nowhere to go and then some guy is like:
"I'll stay behind and hold them off. Here's my pendant. Catch you on the flip side, bro"
That kind of stuff.
If you try to pull this hero crap in one of my sessions, I am going to punch you in the face. Nobody in Sburb should plan to die. Nobody in Sburb should plan to be a sacrifice. I don't care if you want to go out in a blaze of glory, you can stick that idea where it belongs. What part of "you're supposed to grow up" do you not understand. This stuff belongs in comics and movies and guess what, it's where it should stay.

I will schoolfeed the next asshole I meet who has a hard on for committing sudoku for the greater good.

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Okay so you confirmed deaths and recovered pendants. Now you can take a deep breath and let the events sink it. You're gonna have to deal with the fact that people die. One way or another, the game must go on. I don't have a lot to say about this so it's gonna be short alright.
When it comes to dealing with the subject of death, most people just writhe like a flagellum and puke melodrama. It's always the same bromides. "Oh it's so hard but I understand what you're going through, oh it's difficult but you're strong, blah blah blah, death is sad and you'll never get used to it because everybody is a unique snowflake and this is totally not an excuse to pretend to be a motivational speaker."
These people are full of shit. They don't know a single thing about death that doesn't come from a TV screen. So I'm just going to say it like it is.
You're gonna get used to death
And it's not a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing because death makes you learn more about yourself. I'm not entirely sure how to say this so bear with me. It's like this. You are defined by everybody that you meet. Right? It doesn't matter if they were pretty cool guys or if they were assholes, you always react to people. These reactions leave a mark behind. All of these marks are then color-coded based on your feelings and arranged into a mosaic that paints your portrait, pixels by pixels.
And everytime you lose someone, there's a part of yourself that is going to die. It's like something was ripped out from your portrait and it leaves a hole behind.
It's not sad or traumatizing or anything like that just by itself, it's just a hole. But you can TELL that something is missing. Like when you can't remember something and you know that there's something you forgot but you can't do anything about it. That kind of hole.
So you'll find yourself thinking about casual stuff and it'll lead to thinking about someone that died and it'll lead to a void and you'll be like "oh right, there's a piece that is missing". That's the death of a person, right there. You'll go through this crap even if the person was a dick. In fact, the death of assholes is often the most confusing of them all because you don't understand why you miss them.
Yet the thing is, you'll grow up. You'll get over it. You're just going to paint over the hole in your portrait and you'll keep on going. In the end, the person's death didn't really mean anything. Unlike in fancy stories, deaths are anticlimactic and pointless. I mean, real events don't have any morals. They don't need to have a moral.
I think cliché stories are harmful in that regard, they lead people to expect proper dénouement from things that never promised to make sense. And then these people don't know how to cope with it. They'll squint with their eyes and look everywhere for a moral secretly woven in the wax and wanes of their adventure. But there isn't anything hidden. It's just stuff that happens. And people dying is a part of stuff that happens.
The looming feeling of loss that comes with death is just a concomitant overgrowth, a superficial extension to a meeting by happenstance. There is no logic to be found in these individual events. There's nothing that can explain why someone had to die because shit, there's never a good reason for it.
But still there is a point of interest in all of this. It makes you discover something important about yourself that you can't see otherwise. It's when you realize that no matter how many times you lose parts of yourself, there's one part of you that never gets replaced. It's a part of you that just doesn't die.
And it's the part of you that isn't defined by other people.
I mean, it's like how you can't smell your scent, or how you don't recognize your voice when it's recorded. You're blind to the part that defines you the most because it's drowning in all the parts that come from other people. You can only find it when you start losing things. And you'll only meet it face to face when you lose everything.
It's like looking at a night sky where all the stars go out one by one, until there's only one star left. You used to think that it was just a faint blinking light among all the other stars. Well now it's the only thing you have left so you start to pay attention to it, you take a closer look and you realize that hey, it's a motherfucking star. It's a thundering deluge of constant thermonuclear fusion blasting at full throttle. It's burning harder than you could even imagine and it was always there. It's like an ocean that was inside you all along and you just started hearing the rumble of its crashing waves.
I don't know, maybe it's a Might player thing.
It was during my fourth session that it all clicked. It was a session wipe. You know, a session where you are the last survivor. The next to last dude in the game was a PK, he had four kills on his head, I probably should have died too. Well I'll spare you the details. Then it was just me, my roadsignkind abstratus, the eight pendants around my neck and the wreck of a burning session.
I found myself humming the lyrics to that stupid cartoon that pre-installation puts on every damn universe. The show with the octopus crap and the tentacle buddies. You remember the song?
♪ wake up in the morning ♫
there's a brand new day ahead
the sun is bright and the clouds smile down
♫ and all your friends are dead ♪
Now that I think of it, that was when I started writing the FAQ.
I think I rambled too much.

[Admin]

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WARNING: high-cost abilities

The Aspect of Space looks overpowered on paper, sure, but many of its useful abilities suffer from a high cost in Pluck followed by a long cooldown. Cooldowns are a thing that you usually see in endgame abilities (those fancy things you see in Berserk Trigger warnings). You can't just spam these babies. Most of the time, once you use them, you just feel that you can't do it again for some time. In general, the more an ability consumes Pluck in one shot, the longer the cooldown. If you push yourself to use these abilities twice in a row, you'll have various degrees of success followed by falling unconscious/comatose/dead.

Returning to the matter at hand: Space abilities have a lot of cooldowns. Even the best Space Players need between 1 and 3 days to recover the use of [Space Jump]. That's the long-distance teleport that everybody loves. That's why you want the Space Player to keep it for emergencies while readily updating the team about when it is available. It'll become less of an issue after God Tiering, sure. But you need to get there first.

ADVICE: Don't be too shy to grab hands with your Space Player

The Space Player is mostly going to work with portals (these smaller versions of Sburb Gates). It's short distance, it's spammable, it's awesome. There's nothing that can't be fixed by adding more portals. You just need to trust the expert.

Hence, one of the basic drill of teamfighting in Sburb is that when a Space Player offers you a hand – you immediately grab it. It's the signal to go on a portal rollercoaster. Don't be afraid of a little contact; it's time to leave hesitation at the door. Take that hand, jump into portal hell and enjoy the ride along with the Space Player as your demented guide.

ADVICE: How instant-kill abilities work

Space Players have access to the earliest instant-kill ability in the game, [Off With His Head]. They are often mistaken about what the ability does since it will often fizzle and do nothing. They might end up thinking that it's useless/bugged. It isn't exactly the case. You just need to know how this kind of ability works.

In Sburb, instant-kill abilities do an above-average amount of damage. However when this projected damage isn't enough to finish off a target, then the ability fizzles and do absolutely nothing. It's Sburb cheating with odds and probabilities again. You can't half-execute something. You just need to weaken the target first. Hence, Space Players are advised to abuse their space-ish tricks to soften up enemies. THEN, they can yell off with his head to finish the deal. Of course, you don't have to yell ability names like in the cartoons and animes. But this one is too fun to pass.

While we're on the subject: when you use [Off With His Head], you don't have to teleport the stuff into your hand. Anywhere is fine and it's also less weird. Yes, I'm talking to you, the Thief of Space from my last session. We know that there's only a split second before dead monsters turn into grist. That was still creepy.

GLITCH: Don't put a portal inside a portal

Misusing portals has a good chance to create something similar to Broken Gates. Don't mess with that stuff. I mean, this one is kinda obvious but now you can't pretend that I didn't warn you.

TENDENCY: Hey where are you right now?

I once had a Space Player that had a habit of asking everybody their location and where they were heading. Then he updated all of that information on a miniature model of our incipisphere. It was a bit odd. I don't know if it's because he was strongly channeling his Space aspect or if it's because he was weird like that. He even made small figurines of the players to show their current location.

And my model frickin' sucked.

It wasn't wielding the right specibus, the accessories were wrong, the proportions were all wonky and the label misspelled my handle name. Oh, I need to get this off my chest because it bothered me so much. Is it too much to ask for some quality control from compulsive disorders involving a miniature replica of yourself? Gosh, if I ever see that Player again, I'm gonna force him to sit down and make a figurine of me that does not suck.

GLITCH: It does nothing

The ability [Space Rave] does absolutely nothing except making people want to punch you.

Berserk trigger

Space Players generally lapses into a special mode called [Space Prankster] when they go berserk. That's when you can see stars and space through their body. It is an endgame special mode that lifts all restrictions for teleporting/resizing things. It only lasts a few seconds because it drains way too much power to sustain. Also, a fair warning: if your Space Player is in [Space Prankster] mode, don't attempt to hug them or perform drop-kick-to-the-head. You'll end up teleported who knows where.

If you're less lucky, a berserk Space Player may begin casting [Atomic Bonsai]. This ability messes up with matter on the molecular level and causes a nuclear explosion. This is so stupid. How is the caster even supposed to survive? If your Space Player takes out a chunk of Uranium from his/her Sylladex, guess what you need to do:

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* DROP KICK TO THE HEAD *
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